1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multimedia data relay system, multimedia data relay apparatus, and multimedia data relay method.
2. Description of the Related Art
When multimedia data such as music data on a web server is to be written to a recording medium such as a memory card attached to a personal computer, the multimedia data on the web server is temporarily downloaded and relayed by the portable information device (relay apparatus) such as the personal computer and then written in the relay target, i.e., the recording medium through a terminal apparatus such as a PDA.
More specifically, multimedia data received through a network such as the Internet is temporarily stored in the storage device of a relay apparatus, and the stored multimedia data is transmitted in accordance with a transmission request from a terminal apparatus such as a PDA.
When the data format need be converted, a temporary memory in the relay apparatus is used. The multimedia data is gradually loaded from the server to the temporary memory, converted, and then written in the storage device.
However, according to the conventional multimedia data relay system, multimedia data is temporarily written in a storage device such as a hard disk. In this case, if a multimedia data transmission request is issued from a terminal apparatus such as a PDA, and the data is not present in the storage device, the data must be received from the server and written to the storage device again. For this reason, the multimedia data transmission rate decreases.
Additionally, for encrypted data, since the data is written to the storage device, the data is readily read and decrypted.